Blas Gwent

Cosmeston Community Farm Campaign
In July of 2021 My wife, Holly, brought my attention to a Welsh Government Lease coming up on 280 acres of land south of Cosmeston. The land was being offered in two half’s. We bid £100/acre on the more fertile half, including a covering letter outlining a plan to establish a community owned ecological farming institution. Social Farms and Gardens bid £1/acre for the entire property with a covering letter outlining a broadly similar proposal. This correspondence has been reproduced here.

The civil servants responsible for managing this property decided that establishing a public private partnership to develop welsh ecological farming was not an appropriate use of its resources to maximise public value. Instead, the land has been let on a 2 year farm business tenancy. 20 months form now, the Welsh Government will once again be deciding the fate of this particular asset. The aim of the Comeston Community Farm Campaign is to support the Welsh Government to prioritise the ecological foundation of our future food supply by enabling the establishment of this institution in the summer 2023.

Blas Gwent
A foundational piece of this campaign is going to be building a crack team of ecological farmers with a massive customer community behind them. To enable this, we have bought 9 acres of the Gwent levels, on the coast between Cardiff and Newport. We are investing in horticultural equipment, and seeking potential business partners and investors. With the right investment and support, this land could produce something in the region of £500,000 in vegetable sales from June of 2022 to June of 2023. This would achieve a number of important things.


 * 1) It would require the development of a professional team of ecological farmers.
 * 2) It would build a significant customer community.
 * 3) It would demonstrate the economic potential of local food.

We (Jonathan Hughes and Holly Tomlinson) do not expect that any of these things are achievable as long as we continue to privately own the assets of this operation. Our intention is to transfer our investment of cash (and that of our parents) and labour into shares in a Community Benefit Society, that will ultimately be owned by the wider community, and managed as a workers co-operative. Exactly when and how we open our farm to community ownership, and how we build trust in the people we take on as our business partners in this venture, is an open question at this point.

Financial and Labour situation
As it stands, between our savings and support from the banks of mums and dad, we have been able to afford to pay £90,000 in cash for the land. In addition to this, we have accepted an offer on a flat, which once the sale has completed, will leave us with something around £50,000 to cover our startup costs. We are looking for someone to let us a room in the village of Peterstone Wentlooge. Holly has a real job, and does not want to be an organic vegetable farmer, so she will cover our living costs, leaving me (Jono) to work full time on the farm (and yes, I know how lucky I am). In addition to this, we have arranged to take on Alice Taherzadeh as a part time trainee, and we are getting a second person on the farm through the kickstart program. So far then, it looks like we have about 2 FTE, £50,000 and 9 acres. Based on this, we should be able to aim to make sales of around £100,000 in our first year (say, June to June). So, 6 figures is the target.

Startup Costs
We already own a small tractor with a front end loader, an irrigation reel in need of a pipe, a compost blocking machine with the beginning of a home made vacuum needle seeder, a seed drill, wheel hoe, welder, and a range of power tools, basic engineering equipment, computers, phones, a car, and the normal paraphernalia of modern life. To take advantage of cheap things that have come up second hand, we have placed deposits on 3 important items already, a spading machine, an inter-row cultivator, and some polytunnel frames. Here is a list of the additional costs we expect to incur. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does cover a lot of our costs. With a budget of £50,000, we expect this startup to be tight, but achievable. This investment will see us through until May, at which time we expect to start making sales of salad mix to restaurants. By the end of June, we will also need to spend about £5,000 on a refrigerated delivery van, that will form the basis of our farmers market stall and perhaps running deliveries to shops and food hubs. We will look for an ex supermarket van, because the racking will be particularly useful for us to organise our produce.

Financial planning beyond this does not seem useful, as we will no doubt adapt our plans based on market experience and our experience of our land.

Infrastructure


Other than that very fine industrial gate, the property is devoid of infrastructure. Bellow are 2 of the technical drawing we are going to submit in or application for planning permission.

Movable Polytunnel
Given how eutriphied the irrigation water is, it would seems sensible to have any pulytunnel for in ground production movable, to avoid soil salination issues. The tunnel hoops we are buying are 7m wide, and we have enough hoops to make a tunnel 200m long, in addition to extending the above plant nursery to 75m. This would allow our tunnels to cover 5 beds, and would fit quite well in one block (see bed layout bellow). Instead of engineering this 200x7m tunnel to be portable as a whole, my idea would be to make it relatively easy to dissasemble and reassemble in a new location. This migh involve constructung the gable ends, and the first hoop or two (2-4m) being constructed so that they could move as a single unit without removing the platic. The hoops could then be put onto short lenghts of scafold bar, inserted maybe 20cm into the ground. These should have something on them to keep the bottom of the hoops off the ground, to extend the life of the hoops. After installing the ridge pole, we could drive 600mm long marque pegs into the ground at a 45 degree angle at the base of each hoop, place plastic over the entire length of the structure, secured in two point above the gable end doors. This plastic would be attached to roll up curtain poles that would run the length of the tunnel at the base. Paracord could then be laced back and forth across the tunnel, and under the pegs, then tensioned to hold the plastic down. This would give us side ventilation. Not that, in this design, the hoops are not holding the plastic down, it is held down by the ropes and the pegs.

Moving this structure, we would remove the rope, remove whatever is securing the main plastic above the gable end doors, then roll the entire sheet of plastic up on one of the side vent poles. Rolling up one side should be easy, but it would seem important to have some kind of mechanism to support it as we roll down the second side. Next we remove the ridge pole, reposition the gable end structures, move each hoop one by one, reattach the ridge pole, move all the pegs. The heaviest, and most awkward single piece, will be the 200m long main plastic sheet rolled on the two poles. Ideally, we will be able to simply roll the whole thing, then unroll it onto the structure, using the same mechanism we use to support it as we roll it down of the structure to lift it as we roll it up onto the structure. With the right tools (a cordless impact wrench, plastering stilts, a cordless impact drill to drive the pegs, and an auger bit to make the holes for the pole posts, that kind of thing) this could all be done without an excessive amount of labour.

Note that, as well as adressing the soil salinaton issues, there are tthree other significant benefits that help to justify the cost of a movable tunnel.


 * 1) It eliminates the need to rotate crops within the tunnel, removing that limit on the number of solanaceous crops we can grow in our tunnel, for example.
 * 2) It allows us to cover crop land outdoors, then put a tunnel on it for production.
 * 3) It allows us to establish winter salad crops before removing summer fruiting crops, then move the tunnel over those winter salads in the autumn.

Bed Layout
A rectangle measuring 130x230m fits within the 9 acre field (which is not its self a perfect rectangle) Leaving a bit less than 30 at the northern edge of the field for composting, perennial crops, the infrastructure pictured above, and some space for future infrastructure, we can fit a block of field production beds that is 126x200m. This will give 84 of 200m long beds, 1.5m centre to centre, with 30cm wheelings and 120cm bed tops. these 84 beds will be organised into 12 blocks (A through L bellow) of 7 beds, and each of those 7 beds will be a rotational category. So, for example, 1A, 1B, 1C, etc, will be in roots. This system of organisation is designed to give the rotational benefits of minimising the buildup of soil borne disease, whilst getting some of the benefits of polycultures, like reducing the rate of transmission of mobile diseases and pests within a crop family or maximising the beneficial interaction between crop families. It also gives a lot more opportunity to be flexible about how I use the land than contiguous rotational blocks would. For example, if I were to crop a large section, say 1/2, the field in contiguous rotational blocks this year, then were enlarge the block next year, I would have issues with the blocks over lapping, or similarly if the whole field were cropped, and I wanted to put in a perennial crop or a polytunnel and shrink the field, I would struggle to avoid overlap with the new blocks and the old blocks if they were not divided up like this. There is also considerable flexibility around the area given to certain crops. For example, outdoor tomatoes or certain salad crops could move into the squash block.

I would like to have 5 cropping blocks, and two blocks in fertility building cover crops. For those cropping blocks, I will have one root crop block, one general block (salad crops, legumes, and other odd bits, which I call the salad block) an alliums block, a brassica block and a squash block. Brassica clubroot and White onion root rot are the primary soil born diseases I am concerned about. I will put Squash at the end of the rotation, because I hope to be able to get my clover established as the understory in the squash. Brassicas have a long season over winter and into the spring, so the can precede squash. I will want to plant some crops in the autumn to overwinter in both the salad and allium block, so I do not want either of these to be the first block in the rotation, which leaves roots as the first block, after the clover. I think both the salad block and the brassica block are going to be tighter than the allium block, at both end of the season, so it seems to make sense to put the alliums in the middle. These are the reasons why I intend to have my blocks in this order;


 * 1) Root
 * 2) Salad
 * 3) Allium
 * 4) Brassica
 * 5) Squash
 * 6) Clover
 * 7) Clover

I will have mown perennial pasture growing on all my wheelings, like this example:

The spading machine I am buying is 1.2m wide, and I have set the track width on my tractor to leave 1.2m between the wheels. The field is already in a herb rich pasture, and there is no reason to disturb this in the wheelings. I will establish some kind of permanent reference point to make sure that my beds do not move over time.

I am hoping to have up to five rows per bed, giving 24cm between rows. I have not bought my transplanter yet, but I have paid for this front mounted inter-row cultivator:

The reason I want 5 rows, is so that I can use rows 1,3, and 5 if I want 3 rows per bed, rows 2 and 4 if I want 2 rows per bed, or row 3 if I only want one row per bed, and in each case I can use my inter row cultivator or transplanter without making adjustments, or perhaps with minimal adjustments to insert cultivators into the gaps on the rows that are not planted. On a diversified market garden, where lots of different crops have different space requirements, there is a big advantage to having an odd number of rows over an even number, in that it gives you the option of locating several different row spacings symmetrically on a bed, and in the same location relative to the wheelings, such that once a piece of equipment has been set up it does not need constant adjustment for different crops. 5 rows on a 1.2m bed top is tight. 24cm between rows, and 12cm between the outside row and the official edge of the bed. This choice was largely a consequence of the available, very cheap 1.2m second hand spading machine. Either 5 rows on a 1.5m bed, or 3 rows on a 90cm bed, would probably be more manageable. 5 rows on 1.2m is a commitment to very precise tractor work, and high density production.

Variety Selection
Here is a preliminary list of the seed varieties I am thinking of buying. It is a conservative list, in that morally, I would prefer to get fewer seeds from Moles and more from Tamar, as I have more faith in the ethics of Tamar as a company. I have experienced trialing moles varieties against Tamar varieties and found significantly higher yields from the former, or little difference. I intend to revisit this list and swap in Tamar varieties wherever I feel confident to do so, and add a small packet of a Tamar variety for trial where I am not confident.

For spacing, the first number represents the number of rows per bed, while the second represents the number of plantings per linear bed meter. I say plantings, because for a number of crops, each planting will be a number of plants that have been multi sown into a single compost block. For example, with onions I will aim for 3-5 plants per block, and will transplant them at 25cm spacing, with 5 rows per bed, giving approximately 80 plants per bed meter, or just over 50 plants per m2, including wheelings but excluding headlands. Once I have developed this into a full crop plan, I will update this chart to include each sowing, projected transplant date and location, harvest dates, yield dates, quantity estimates, and projected sales figures.

Nursery Design
Soil blocks have a lot of advantages for plant health. Two disadvantages is that they tale a lot more space than plug trays, and can be more difficult to handle. I will make 120x30cm frames out of 2x1 timber, staple fine galvanised steel mesh to them, then transfer my blocks directly from the blocking machine onto these trays. (Each one of these trays will hold about as many plants as a single 25x50cm plug cell tray). This will make it easy to move blocks around, in and out of a germ chamber, and ultimately onto the transplanter.

I want a heated space for the more cold sensitive plants, that will be covered at night with a n insulated quilt, for which I will use a roofing product called breather quilt to avoid condensation issues.



The roll up cover is illustrated in green above. If the double row of trays above were 20m long it would be 100 trays. I need to finish my sowing plan, before I can accurately predict the nursery space requirement.

Eliminating Fossil Fuel
In year one, this insulated nursery space will be heated with a diesel space heater designed for a van. An 8kw heater of this type can be bought for under £90, and (with some reprogramming) can be run for free on waste engine oil.

In order to eliminate fossil fuel dependance from this operation, heating this plant nursery in the spring is one of the critical energy requirements. The greatest energy demand for this is going to be in February, so solar power will be marginal. Some kind of thermal storage system would make sense. Water could be heated during the day with a heat pump, running inside the polytunnel. This warm water could then warm the insulated nursery space at night. The best place to put a thermal storage tank will be under the blocks, like so:

Green represents insulation (because I cant be bothered to draw wiggly lines) and red is a tank of hot water, largely structurally supported by the ground. The technique to build this is to dig a hole, place insulation and dpm in the hole, then fill with water and backfill around the insulation simultaneously, such that the weight of the water and the force of the ground balance. This is, by far, the cheapest way to make a hydraulic thermal energy storage tank. Note that the insulated tank lid creates a tray above the tank, bellow the seedlings. That tray will be lined with dpm, such that hot water can be pumped into it to radiate heat into the seedling chamber. This will allow a pump to be controlled by a thermostat, to maintain a set temperature for the plants.

It might be useful to hire a better engineer than myself to calculate the thermal loss through the insulation at the average annual temperature in February. I put it somewhere in the ball park of 25kwh/day. With a heat pump with a COP of 2.5, that would require 10kwh of electricity. The energy input, if it is solar, will be much more variable than that thermal loss. At that time of year, with solar panels on a static angle facing the midday sun, we might reasonably expect the total daily output in kwh to equal the kw raiting of the panels, so that would imply a 10kw array.

I wonder how this kind of system would compare to a passive annualised geothermal solar energy storage system. Essentially, digging out a significant portion of the footprint of the polytunnel a couple of meters deep, lining it with dpm and insulation, laying 'earth tubes' in the hole before backfilling, we could use the floor of the tunnel as a thermal battery.

Blowing hot air through the earth tubes in summer would cool the polytunnel. Dry earth, like masonry, has a reasonable thermal storage capacity, and though it is not insulative it has a very low thermal conductive speed; approximately 1m/month. If the floor were insulated strategically to force the heat to travel 6 meters through the earth (that could be 3m in, the thermal energy that we put into the earth would come back out 6 months later.

This could work, but my intuition is that it would not be worth the effort, cost, nor the externalities of the plastic materials involved (pipes, membrane and insulation). Partly because we will need photovoltaic panels to run other electrical equipment, including sufficient capacity for an electric tractor and refrigerated delivery vehicle, as well as an irrigation pump, the blocking machine and cement mixer, and a range of miscellaneous tools and equipment, before we can eliminate fossil fuel reliance from this operation. My ball park estimate of the cost to do this is about £20,000, excluding labour (which is considerable in this plan, as that seems vaguely achievable by converting vehicles to electric and building battery storage systems using components from electric vehicles that have been written off after a crash, and the like).

Soil Fertility Management
There is a school of thought about ecological soil fertility management that holds that all soils contains all the elemental chemistry required for life, all that is required is to develop the soil biology to liberate this chemistry from soil particles, and that will make it plant available. This school of thought is optimised by the researcher Elaine Ingham. This is opposed to the theoretical basis of conventional, chemical agriculture, that focuses on providing primary plant nutrients in the form of soluble chemistry to feed plants.

A majority of organic vegetable farmers work on the basis of some combination of these two approaches, managing the land to maximise the biological health of the soil, whilst paying attention to soluble primary nutrients, ph, and the like, and amending the soil with organic amendments accordingly. A different school of thought was developed by a scientist called William Albrecht in the 1940's. The Albrecht method differs from conventional agronomy by emphasis on the ratios of the total amount of elements in the soil, in relation to the soils capacity to hold on to those elements, as opposed to focusing on the absolute quantities of elements in soluble forms.

The claim is that this method, often referred to as 'soil mineral balancing', improves the microbiological health of a soil, produces healthier plants with a strong natural resistance to disease, and produces more nutritious food with significant benefits to plant, animal and human health. In my research so far, I have found papers that claim to prove that mineral balancing does not improve yield, but maximising bulk yield isn't exactly what the theory claims anyway. I have found both interesting refutation and confirmation of this theory, so I am at a loss what to think.

I'm going to get this Albrecht test because I am interested enough in the Albrecht method that I want to trial it:

http://newgenagri.com/product/soil-testing/

I would like to get a more standard soil tests as well. I have been looking through this list

https://cawood.co.uk/services/laboratory-testing/

The one called Soil agri-nutrient saver suite has every plant nutrient (excluding those in water and air) except boron, chlorine and nickel, and includes recommendations. The one called Soil comprehensive trace element suite includes boron but does not include chlorine, copper, molybdenum, nickel or zinc, and I'm not sure if it comes with recommendations or not. Maybe I will wait and see what comes back from the first test before choosing a second test. There is a test on that list called Water - Irrigation Suitability, which I will use to test my highly eutriphied ditch water.

I'm looking at spending money on some kind of organic fertiliser, and trying to figure out what. I did a cheap home test for NPK, and it came back high P, low N and K. I'm not overly concerned about nitrogen, as it is 78% of our atmosphere, and I think strong microbiology can sort it out, but I am concerned about both low soluble potassium and high soluble phosphorous. Seaweed and woodash are both good sources of potassium. I am also investigating the idea of making a brine extraction from seawater. Get a barrel of seawater, mix in lye, then let it settle, and siphon off the top. This gets rid of a bulk of the sodium and leaves a concentrated solution of sea minerals. To test this I am making a batch to send to a lab.

My idea is to define a range of treatments, get the materials in small quantities, set up a bed in my polytunnel with maybe 0.5m2 for each treatment, then transplant radish in early February. Hopefully before the end of march we will have something we can harvest, measure the yield, measure brix, taste, and use that to inform what we do with the fields. It might even be worth getting a grow light to bring those radish on a bit.

Part of my issue here is that my financial planning relies on having a highly productive first year of production. Perhaps a way around this would be to focus on building the biological health of the soil slowly, and compensating for any mineral deficiencies by foliar feeding. This feels like cheating, but it can be a way to avoid detrimental impacts on soil health, whilst providing some suplemental fertility to plants directly.

In row weed control
Through the use of the inter-row cultivator and flame weeding for direct seeded crops, a certain amount of the weeding will be covered. This will leave a significant amount of in row hand hoe and hand weeding labour. The most immediate way to reduce this will be buying a pair of wheel hoe attachments from terrateck, a disc ridger and a pair of finger weeders. The principles of those attachments are explained in this video;

A second way we hope to reduce hand hoe work is by developing an optical in row cultivator system on the inter row cultivator. Essentially, we aim to develop an open source version of this principle; Given where this open source robot project is at, this seems reasonably achievable, it could pay for its self through labour savings at Blas Gwent in short order, and could lead to products that would be immediately useful to organic vegetable farmers all over the world, which could fund the development of that open source robot project. Given the number of urgent jobs I have on this farm startup, I am not sure how long it will take for this optical in row cultivator project to reach the top of my priorities list, but I am sure it will get there.

Website
blas gwent website